Nonlinear Bilateral Teleoperation: Stability Analysis

This paper aims to take a first step towards the unification of the stability analysis for teleoperators with time-delays. It proposes a general Lyapunov-like function that, upon slight modification, allows to analyze the stability of different control schemes, ranging from constant to variable time delays, with or without the scattering transformation and with or without position tracking. It also presents design examples of the corresponding Lyapunov-like function for some schemes based on PD controllers and on the scattering transformation for variable time-delays.